26th Annual Session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Minsk

MINSK, 10 July (BelTA) – President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE PA) Christine Muttonen said she supports the Helsinki 2 initiative in an interview with the Belarus 1 TV channel, BelTA has learned.

At the opening plenary session of the 26th OSCE PA Annual Session in Minsk, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko suggested starting a discussion on the need to launch a new Helsinki Process in the OSCE. “I fully support this initiative. I think this is a good idea, as we need to find solutions to the accumulated problems as soon as possible. We should speed up our work in many aspects, restart the negotiation process, and create a foundation that would enable us to work together and trust one another. Trust and cooperation are of essence,” Christine Muttonen noted.

The OSCE PA president said that Belarus is one of the countries that can not only serve as a bridge between the East and the West, but also establish a platform for dialogue, for instance, on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the Ukrainian conflict. “It is certainly important to bring together the stakeholders. It is also necessary to build relations of trust. The thing is that, first of all, parties to the conflict should trust us to come here. This is what Belarus is trying to do, and we are very grateful for this,”Christine Muttonen said.